Scotland’s oldest Royal Burgh predates Glasgow’s charter and sits practically inside it — which makes Rutherglen’s route to the bench the shortest kind of formality. Ten minutes, one free diagnosis, and a fixed number before anything happens.
M74 junction 1A puts Rutherglen on the motorway network seconds from home, and Charing Cross is ten to fifteen minutes up the road. The rail option is just as easy — Rutherglen station straight into Central. And for a drive that’s already fragile, the padded insured parcel remains the calmest passenger seat in Scotland.
Ruglonians bring the full spread: trades machines with years of invoices, main-street business tills and back-office PCs, and the family externals that quietly became the only copy of everything. Eight centuries of burgh pragmatism applies — no drama at the counter, just the order of operations: image, fix, verify, return.
Whatever arrives, the terms don’t move with the postcode: a free diagnostic first, a fixed figure in writing before any work — £250 + VAT for cards and sticks, £300 + VAT for any single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — and on most jobs, no recovery means no fee. Every job is handled in-house by our own engineers and your data never leaves the UK.
Whichever costs you less bother — you’re close enough that both are trivial. The one wrong answer is the third option: leaving it plugged in “to see”. Powered off in a drawer beats powered on in hope, every time, until it travels.
Always get one before anything is binned — “dead” from a shop usually means “dead to software”, and most of this site is about exactly those drives coming back. The second opinion here is free, in writing, and occasionally very good news.
Power it down, pad it well, and choose your route — the counter at Tay House, 300 Bath Street (Mon–Fri 9am–5:30pm) or insured, tracked post from Rutherglen. Either way it’s diagnosed free and quoted in writing before anything is decided.
All data recovery services — diagnosis, imaging and recovery — happen at our Glasgow lab, whichever town the job starts in.
Stop using the drive. Every further read or write risks overwriting what is still recoverable, and on a failing mechanism it risks the heads touching the platters. If the machine is still on, shut it down properly and leave it off.
Don't run recovery software on the original. Consumer tools write their own index files to the disk they are scanning. On a healthy drive with deleted files that is often survivable; on a drive with bad sectors or a mechanical fault it turns a good outcome into a partial one.
Don't open the drive. A hard disk opened outside a filtered-air bench collects particles that score the platters within a few rotations. If it has already been opened, tell us — it changes the approach, not the willingness.
Remove the drive where you can. Please send the hard drive or SSD on its own; we are not able to accept complete laptops or desktop systems. Any computer shop will take it out in minutes. External drives are the exception — send those complete with the enclosure, because on many models the bridge board holds the encryption key and a bare disk reads as unformatted.
The diagnostic is free and it is a real one. The drive goes on the bench, not through a script: we identify the fault class, check whether the media is stable enough to image, and establish what is realistically recoverable before anyone talks about money.
Then you get a fixed figure in writing. Not a range, not an estimate that moves once work starts. You decide with the number in front of you, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay if the recovery does not succeed.
We image first, then work on the copy. The original is read once, as gently as the hardware allows, and every repair happens on that image. It is the difference between one careful attempt and a drive that degrades with each pass.
Everything is done in-house. Your drive is not couriered on to a partner laboratory, and your data does not leave the UK. When the recovery is complete you get a file listing to check before anything is returned, and the copy on our systems is securely wiped 30 days after you confirm you have it.